


all i taste is blood between my teeth

by magicites



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-10
Updated: 2012-07-10
Packaged: 2017-11-09 13:16:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/455855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magicites/pseuds/magicites
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A liar and a mutant. A cheater and a freak. Two desperate trolls, ensnared in a safety net of luck and chance that unravels a little more each day.</p>
            </blockquote>





	all i taste is blood between my teeth

**Author's Note:**

> i posted this a while ago, but deleted it because the mods at hso didn't want people to post their works yet, regardless of whether it was chosen as their team's entry or not. well, now it's safe to, but i'm too nervous to submit it to the group. thus, it stays standalone.

Your name is Karkat Vantas, and your matesprit is possibly the luckiest idiot to exist on the face of Alternia.

Vriska Serket is not lucky because she got to meet you; oh _fuck_ no, pitying you was definitely the worst choice she’s ever made in her life, and that’s saying a lot for a troll who acts on every moronic impulse that happens to enter her head. Sharing a quadrant with you only confirms the fact that she’s an idiot who doesn’t know how to keep herself safe.

Sometimes you wonder if she keeps you around just for the thrill of keeping you a secret. After all, you’re nothing a mutant, bound to be culled the moment you step outside the safety of Vriska’s hive.

(You fled your own hive sweeps back, when the drones grew suspicious of the colors you chose to decorate it with, when the rest of your neighbors used their blood color as accents to the dark gray and tore it to the ground. They presumed you dead in the rubble, when really Vriska had stolen you away at the crack of dawn. You’ll never forget how you saw, even in your state of shock, the way sweat matted her already-tangled hair into a thick knot she was forced to cut off a week later, or how the sun burned her so badly the skin on her face peeled until she was nothing but a sea of cerulean gore. She was so pained, so reckless and yet so incredibly strong that you fell hard in pity with her and never looked back.

When she approached you a week later, demanding that you become her matesprit as payback for saving your life, you wondered how deranged she truly was to think that she could win your affection like that.)

Vriska lives for adrenaline rushes, and there’s nothing riskier than harboring your freakish mutant of a redrom partner right underneath the noses of the drones. Karkat Vantas is dead in the eyes of Alternian law, but your own eyes are the signs pointing to your true death if they’re ever seen by the wrong troll. You can’t hide them, nor can you hide the constant scabs that slowly morph into scars caused by the moments where your self-loathing overpowers rational thought and your claws rake hatred into your flesh.

(“You need a moirail. I can’t fucking be both for you. I can’t be your everything,” she told you once, as she held you in her wiry arms and shooshed you back to a sane state of mind. You can’t remember much, only a cloth gingerly wiping the blood off of your face during the only time Vriska has ever been gentle in her entire life.

She left to go find you a decent palemate, and didn’t return until weeks later, toting a clumsy yellowblooded girl behind her. She let her stay with you, and you became close friends despite your best attempts to push her away. Though she found out your blood color long before you ever planned to reveal it to her, and she ran away in tears. Sometimes you still hear her cries of, “Freak!” in your nightmares. Other times you hear her screams trail into a gurgle as Vriska slit her throat open.)

Whenever you voice your fears, she only laughs at you. She asks why she would bother to keep you safe so long if she didn’t pity you as much as she does. Most times, you argue with her, but she never fails to pin you to the ground and kiss you breathless.

Most times after a fight like that, you end up pailing. You never use a bucket; you tried once, and nearly threw up when you saw your freakishly bright genetic material tainting hers.

Now, you usually take it to a pile of sheets set up in the corner. She helps you burn the sheets in the morning, long after every sane troll has gone to sleep.

(“Vriska, seriously, you have long since climbed past shithive maggots on the crazy scale. You have now completely overtaken the 'puckered asshole’s melted think-pan' tier and claimed it as solely your own. Go inside already. Let me take care of this before the sun burns off the last bits of skin you still have clinging to that scarred mess you attempt to pass as a face.”

“Karkat, stop being such a wriggler! I will be fine if I’m outside for five minutes.”

“You’re not going to be saying that when you start burning, dumbass.”

“Uuuuuuuugh, just shut up and start the fire already.”)

She’s gone most nights. You know where she goes. She’s old enough to get away living without a lusus, but she’s pissed off too many Legislacerator and Subjugglators to be completely safe from the law herself, despite her blood color. The crime circuits are her safe haven, and her only sources of income are completely illegal.

It’s easier when you handle the money. It gives you a sense of control over something in your life, and it keeps her from blowing it on the first piece of useless shit that catches her eye.

Now, she really only comes home to either give you all of the cash she’s accumulated by risking your entire savings on easily manipulated card games or to throw her arms around your shoulder, kiss your neck, nibble on your ears until you’re putty in her hands, and ask for more money.

You know that she cheats on every game she’s ever played, especially the ones where there’s any sort of stake involved. She’s not gambling so much as she is manipulating others into letting her win using her freaky mind bullshit. The only time she ever loses is when she goes against highbloods.

(“God fucking dammit, Serket,” You only called her by her last name when you were so angry with her you were about to leave and never come back, mutation be damned, “that was the last of our money! How are we supposed to eat now!?”

“How the fuck was I supposed to know I was going up against a table full of seadwellers?” She screamed back. Being so mad she was reduced to tears was a complete first for her. “We have to have something stashed around here, right?”

“No we fucking don’t, because I listened to you and gave you everything! You said you could win it back! You said that you’d make enough money so you wouldn’t have to leave for an entire month!”

Pain flashed in her eyes. “I know, and I’m fucking sorry, alright!? It won’t happen again!”

“We literally have no money left, and we’ve ran out of pretty much everything. How the fuck are we supposed to eat?”

“I’ll figure something out.”

Somehow, deep in your mind, you knew this meant stealing from others. 

You‘d swear on the fact you didn’t help kill the troll she robbed. You only told her how to hide the evidence of the murder as she pestered you from the husktop she also stole from them.)

She doesn’t use luck to win her games, but you know she has a surplus of it. It doesn’t manifest when she wins a bet, but you see a little bit of it being used every time a troll has gone missing and the Legislacerators were too bored with the case to continue it, or when she finds a troll naïve enough for her to scam them out of their live savings.

But you know that her luck is bound to run out eventually. You only hope that she’ll be able to pick up the pieces when your lives finally shatter.

(She comes home one day, skin more blue than gray, and she grins at you. You stare at the gap where her left fang used to be. “Guess I’m banned from that place now. The assholes told me I was cheating again, and they said that they’re tired of my bullshit. Whatever. They’re missing out on one of their best gamblers.”

She’s run out of luck, and so have you.)


End file.
